The Dreamtime

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I don’t dream very much, Susan once said to me. We were having a talk about some crazy dream I was recalling. They’re always crazy, of course. But the conversation was about whether we dream – all of us – whenever we sleep.

I argued yes, we all do. We just don’t always remember them. I remember a lot of mine, at least for a few minutes after I awake. It helps if I talk about them right away, otherwise they evaporate pretty quickly.

That’s the nature of dreaming: it’s just the random firing of neurons that activate memory, but isn’t intended to stay. Humans simply connect these unrelated memories and put them into a sequence that has some sort of narrative nature.

Dreams are, as I understand them, just the random but necessary effects of sleep in mammals. They may occur in other animals like fish, birds, etc., but I don’t really know. I suspect that old reptilian brain buried deep in our grey matter is the source. I know that my dogs and cats dream, because I’ve watched and heard them dreaming.

We dream, as I understand it, because our brains need the time to clear the buffers. Just like computers. For the same reason, we reboot our cable modems every few weeks; to clear it and reset the buffers. Humans do it nightly. Without sleep and dreams, we have simply too much “stuff” in our consciousness to handle and we’d become psychotic.

Humans find meaning in pattern, and see patterns in everything. If we can find images of Jesus in the burnt bread of a grilled cheese sandwich, it’s hardly surprising we find a story in a dream. That’s just our pareidolia. It’s how we’re built.

Last night I dreamt we were in England. London, in the summer. I was walking Keppie and Pico – our Flat-coated Retriever and Long-haired Chihuahua of 20 years ago, along the sidewalk. I was at the edge of a park (Kew Gardens?), a great green space, waiting beside the road for Susan to join us. Keppie was panting and eager, and sat down. I lifted Pico onto a low brick wall along the roadside to watch the traffic while we waited for her to arrive. She was on a bus. It came down a hill, around the corner and stopped in front of me, and I got on. Inside, it was all done in white, like our kitchen, with cupboards and cabinets. I started speaking to the passengers and found we were going to Mexico City. The bus went up a hill, and into a different city, a busy, crowded place. It stopped at a junkyard, and we got out. The dogs were gone. It was dangerous, but a man got out with us and told us it was perfectly safe. We entered a store that became a house where the owner – a young mechanic in a sleeveless T-shirt who was cleaning something – told us again it was safe and he would introduce us to people who liked Canadians. I was hot, and wanted to remove my leather motorcycle jacket, so I went into another room to do it, but my arms got tangled in the sleeves and I couldn’t get it off. The room was also almost all white. Everyone was waiting for me to come back so they could continue on. I struggled with the sleeves. Then I awoke.

Meaningful? Not likely. More like a stew of random memories. I have fond memories of Mexico, England, my (now departed) pets, and, of course, Susan. Stepen LaBerge writes:

Whether awake or asleep, the brain constructs a model of reality-consciousness from the best available sources of information. During waking, those sources are external sensory input in combination with internal contextual and motivational information. During sleep, little external information is available, so consciousness is constructed from internal sources. These include expectations derived from past experience, and motivations-wishes, such as S. Freud observed, but also fears. The resulting experiences are what we call dreams. In these terms, dreaming is perception free from external sensory constraint, while perception is dreaming constrained by sensory input-hallucinations that happen to be true.

Dreams are simply an artificial and undirected construct – a fantasy world built from random snippets of memory and associations. Any meaning we ascribe is arbitrary. Dream interpretation is, Freud be damned, mostly fraud and snake oil sold by wanna-be psychics and hucksters.

That doesn’t mean dreams don’t contain meaningful information, just that the interpretation is usually stretched or even bogus. Interpreting dreams is akin to seeing animals in clouds, or Jesus in grilled cheese. You can find a pattern if you look for it, because we’re biologically evolved to find patterns in everything, but like the “Face on Mars” we imagine more than we actually see.

As for meaningful information – there’s no magic or paranormal in any of the associations. They all have an explicable, logical source. As for my dream…

I’ve been to Mexico many times, including Mexico City and Morelia. I’ve been to England, and spent a couple of weeks in London. We recently discussed another visit there to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. My visit to England still resonates with me, every time we watch a BBC show – which we see far more often than we watch American TV.

My affection for dogs I enjoy every day. I recently scanned some photos of our previous dogs – including Keppie and Pico – from a box of photos I pulled out of the basement a few weeks back.

Leather jacket? One of my old motorcycle garments: we were discussing passing along or selling my bike wear when we clean the basement this spring, since I doubt I’ll ever be able to afford another bike.

The bus with the white interior? Our kitchen, renovated last year and part of my daily life, just transposed into a vehicle. Buses? probably from the recent budget deliberations. Or a memory of transit rides in England. Or more recently some trips in Toronto and Ottawa.

There’s nothing odd or paranormal in any of the images, or the memories; only when seen as a whole and you’re looking for narrative does it seem strange. What intrigues me is the mix of relatively old and new without any recognizable or logical connection. It shows me that the brain stores memories that the conscious may forget, but which can be brought to the surface any time. And that it doesn’t give a damn for coherency or narrative.

If you’re looking for meaning in your dreams, don’t look any further than your own memories. Those websites that offer to translate your baffling dreams into coherency for a “small” fee are just skinning your cash. The rest are just codswallop. Especially those that use the words “psychic” or “astrologer” with their descriptions. That’s just malarkey piled on more malarkey. There is some real psychology in dream interpretation, but not on those sites.

Diego’s Quotes

"No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual phil-anthropic distinctions."Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Ch. 11: Higher Laws